The Register

Now's a good time to read up on Cyber Essentials Plus A government crackdown on British MSPs' security practices is drawing ever closer after the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) floated plans to make Cyber Assessment Framework compliance mandatory.…

Digi Secretary Nadine Dorries: CMA to 'report to me' on the next steps UK government has asked the Competition and Markets Authority to do an even deeper dive into Nvidia's $40bn takeover of Arm after initial findings unearthed negative implications for chip design choice.…

Cloudy analytics contender is also having a look at Amazon's Graviton silicon Cloudy data-cruncher Snowflake has added Python support to its "Snowpark" developer toolkit.…

Woman tells New Zealand police she was held hostage by small marsupial Though it pales in comparison to the bloodlust seen in last year's tale of "mortal wombat" – where the marsupial allegedly went berserk on a family in the Australian outback – a possum holding a woman "hostage" in New Zealand is just as absurd.…

Another nice Nest you've got me into, Google Users of Google's Nest Hub are reporting problems with the smart screen, with some comparing its functionality to that of a brick.…

Some punters not happy with former Capita-owned biz, now under control of Montagu Private Equity Education Software Solutions – a one-time Capita-owned school software provider now under the control of Montagu Private Equity – is being marked down by customers for moving to minimum three-year licensing contracts.…

Going back to the future with smaller data centres and a Patchwork Kilt British-based open source advocacy company OpenUK rounded off the COP26 summit by donating a Net Zero Data Centre Blueprint to the Eclipse Foundation.…

Teradata also sees wings clipped in ongoing battle with German ERP giant A SAP patent was not "inventive enough" to be legally binding, according to a US judge in an intellectual property case which also saw Teradata's claim in the dispute reduced.…

And in the end, policy tweaks made most of it unnecessary Sheffield University's failed Student Lifecycle Project went through three leaders, several changes in scope and was ultimately superseded by government policy change before the bulk of the £30m project was abandoned in what is shaping up to be a classic IT disaster.…

Testing times for Chipzilla as it emits patches to protect PCs, equipment Certain Intel processors can be slipped into a test mode, granting access to low-level keys that can be used to, say, unlock encrypted data stored in a stolen laptop or some other device.…

Doug Merritt thanked for service, but no explanation offered for change Analytics firm Splunk’s CEO Doug Merritt has stepped down, effective immediately, without warning.…

Company claims it poses no threat, yet regs want China influence out The US subsidiary of China Telecom has filed an emergency appeal it hopes will prevent the impending revocation of the company's license to operate in the USA, which the The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) terminated in October on grounds the carrier is a national security threat.…

Texas and pals are back with more details of Chocolate Factory's alleged efforts to unfairly rig the online advertising world More than a dozen US states have filed yet another amended complaint against Google to include what they say is more evidence of the web giant abusing its dominant position in online advertising.…

Average cloudy data stash hits 15TB and and median value tripled to over 3TB Data management software vendor Veeam has offered a snapshot (pardon the pun) of how its customers put different public clouds to work.…

Moscow slammed for 'reckless, dangerous, irresponsible' weapon test In a test of its missile technology, Russia destroyed an old space satellite on Monday, littering Earth's orbit with fragments and forcing astronauts on the International Space Station to temporarily take shelter.…

System Two takes modular, data-center-inspired approach. Plus: 127-qubit Eagle Big Blue hopes will fly Huge, monolithic quantum computers aren't in IBM's vision of the technology. Rather, the IT giant sees parallel, distributed systems made up of different kinds of quantum computing units working in unison.…

Middle Kingdom floats fresh data security rules, too, with eight-hour privacy breach notification requirement China’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection has expelled a communist party member for allowing cryptocurrency mining to happen, corruption, and other infractions.…

That's year on year from a base close to zero ... but still, that makes it the fifth biggest in the Middle Kingdom right out of the blue A Chinese smartphone chip designer has come out of nowhere to take on capitalist rivals, though questions remain over whether the outfit can continue its meteoric rise amid financial troubles at its parent company.…

Blacksmith is latest hammer horror Boffins at ETH Zurich, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and Qualcomm Technologies have found that varying the order, regularity, and intensity of rowhammer attacks on memory chips can defeat defenses, thereby compromising security on any device with DRAM.…

Now would be a good idea to check you're up-to-date US-sanctioned Positive Technologies has pointed out three vulnerabilities in Zoom that can be exploited to crash or hijack on-prem instances of the videoconferencing system.…

All stacked up and nowhere to go NASA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) has administered a kicking to the US space agency over its handling of the Artemis project, making grim reading for anyone hopeful of even a 2025 crewed lunar landing.…

Microsoft's Raymond Chen was tasked with digging into the issue One of the most consistently interesting and entertaining Microsoft blogs, Raymond Chen's Old New Thing, recently covered the dissection of a best-selling bit of software for Windows 95 – SoftRAM 95. There are few lessons about modern software in there as well.…

For all your Windows-on-Snapdragon developer needs Developer hardware for Windows on Arm has finally debuted with a low price matched by an even lower specification.…

Illegal irritant raises its head again after drone investigation A radio-controlled aeroplane operator blamed the crash of his replica WWII model in a lorry park on 2.4GHz radio jammers.…

Hardcopy sales plunge double digits in Western Europe, both inkjets and lasers impacted The Paperless Office strategy might be working finally ... but only because print vendors can't make enough hardware to satisfy demand.…

Also: Emergency patch for Windows Server after Patch Tuesday broke single sign-on for some users An update to the Insiders version of Windows 11 includes a massive list of bug fixes, many of them serious, showing the wisdom of holding back on an early upgrade from Windows 10.…

Check your outputs, kids Bork!Bork!Bork! There is a reminder to check your outputs in today's edition of signage sileage as the actor Megan Fox finds herself upstaged by Microsoft Windows.…

Guaranteed Telecom, Met Technologies nurse £35k penalty, and to them that's meaningful Ofcom has slapped two small telcos, Guaranteed Telecom and Met Technologies, with a financial penalty for switching the home phone services of more than 100 people without their knowledge or consent.…

Which, alongside its £20-a-pop COVID-19 tests, isn't a great look If you're paying for a vital service such as a COVID-19 test when travelling abroad, it's reasonable to expect it to be backed by an approved app from one of the major app stores. However not if that test is from health lab Randox.…

Saving the planet is sexier than the next iPhone Opinion War! Huh! What is it good for? Our survey said: absolutely nothing.…

Submission to USA's call for chip supply chain warns on 'blunt interventions', making it far more colorful than most Google has suggested the US government's National Institute of Standards and Technology develop standards for some silicon, in hopes of improving the semiconductor supply chain.…

For when a terse email just won't do Who, Me? Passive aggression lurks in today's tale from the Who, Me? archives, replete with naughty words and cartoon scribblings of a corporate life satirist.…

Shall we call it Die-Fi? Or NoTooth? Either would be unkind, as this experiment used little radiation, but much exotic hardware Boffins from the UK's Lancaster University and the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia have transmitted and received data wirelessly using nuclear radiation.…

One company for devices, one for office kit, another for infrastructure, batteries & tech services, Kioxia stake to be sold Japanese industrial giant Toshiba has announced it will divide into three companies, and that its governance needs a thorough overhaul.…

Looks like feuding hackers wanted to expose Feds' failings as a public service. We want to believe The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has admitted that a software misconfiguration let parties unknown send email from its servers.…

Emperor Penguin rates Memory Folios tech – source of that performance bump – as most important new feature in 'not huge' release Linus Torvalds has loosed the first release candidate for version 5.16 of the Linux kernel.…

Thousands of servers, hundreds of thousands of IP addresses used by scammer to drum up $7m in fake web advert impressions Aleksandr Zhukov, a Russian national and the self-proclaimed "king of fraud," this week received a 10-year prison sentence for carrying out a $7m digital ad fraud scheme.…

Ability to block 'view source' for specific URLs hasn't actually worked for years Future Chromium-based browsers under administrative control will be able to prevent users from viewing webpage source code for specific URLs, a capability that remained unavailable to enterprise customers for the past three years until a bug fix landed earlier this week.…

What a difference a year makes? It took Apple less than a year to seemingly start undoing decades of x86 and Intel dominance in the traditional PC chip market.…

And they had a wildcard cert too. Still feeling secure? Black Hat Europe An astonishing piece of vulnerability probing gave infosec researchers a way into to Microsoft's management controls for Azure Cosmos DB – with full read and write privileges over customer databases.…

Auto-restart or manual update requires manual interaction to bring a gadget back to the light Some Samsung phones managed by Microsoft Intune are dropping out of compliance after an automatic restart or update, the Windows giant has admitted.…

Reflected light points to Moon-like material on recently discovered rock A freshly discovered train-sized rock that tags along with Earth as a constant companion orbiting the Sun is most likely a fragment of the Moon resulting from an ancient lunar impact.…

Call that an outage? Now this is an outage Updated Customers of BT tentacle Plusnet are still finding themselves without email after issues with the service entered a third day.…

At the same time, Brit MPs call for tighter regulations on AI snooping An explosion in workplace monitoring during the pandemic – in part supported by common software tools from global vendors – threatens to erode trust in employers and employees' commitment to work, according to a European Commission research paper.…

Loved by users, impenetrable to others, but 6.0 update aims to change that F# designer Don Syme said this week that the new version, 6.0, aims to be "more normal as a language" in order to improve take-up.…

Eye-catching claim in an eye-catching case Autonomy's former chief financial officer has alleged the firm collapsed partly because two financial analysts agreed to badmouth it in the hope of making a profit from its demise.…

Prolonged outage in Europe and beyond dampens productivity If you struggled to get into your Gmail this morning, it wasn't just you. Unhappy users from Europe all the way to South Africa reported a significant outage.…

Everything but catching the thing: Rocket Lab prepares for recovery Interview New Zealand's Rocket Lab is set to launch another Electron rocket - a precursor to the rocketeer's first attempt at catching a descending booster. The Register caught up with CEO Peter Beck to discuss helicopters, Mars and visiting Venus.…

Because Windows is what Linux users really want, right? Facing rising demand for high-end Linux boxes but also issues supporting the software on its high-end kit, HP is trying solve the problem for customers by using Windows as a universal shim.…

Weekend upgrade shows how many MoD staff made personal use of tech On Call A reader takes us back to a bygone era, when Blighty's brass inhabited wood-panelled offices, and the air was thick with pipe smoke and WW2 anecdotes. Welcome to On Call.…